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The Operations Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914

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The Operations Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914 Paul M. Kennedy The Operations Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914 Analysis of recent literature* The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be contrary to common sense... Clausewitz: Vom Kriege1 How can you have any organisation while the army is managed by civilians? Kaiser Wilhelm II to the British military attaché2 The strategic planning of the Great Powers prior to 1914 has been a topic of continual fascination to historians for both military and non-military reasons. On the one hand, there has been the natural interest of the military writer in the operational, tactical and logistical contents of these plans and in the extent to which they anticipated the testing strategical conditions of the First World War itself. On the other hand, an equally intense concern has been shown by the student of politics in the broader, non-technical aspects of military planning: how far, for example, did the plans of the various General Staffs restrict their government's freedom of action and, to that extent, encroach upon the decision-making domain of the civilians? How far did they reflect the prevailing "unspoken assumptions"3 about a country's foreign policy, the protection of national interests, and the nature of international relations and political morality? How far, indeed, were they actually responsible for the outbreak of that catastrophic conflict in the summer of 1914? It is precisely because this topic has always possessed both a military and a political aspect (frequently hard to disentangle, as much of what follows will show) that it has traditionally attracted so large an amount of historical attention. This traditional interest in the pre-war plans has been intensified in recent years as a consequence of the great controversy which has been raging since 1961 over Professor Fritz Fischer's interpretation of the origins of the First World War - for, in the allocation to Germany of the major responsibility for the outbreak of that conflict, Fischer and his school have paid particular attention to the rôle of the "military party" in Berlin. According to this interpretation, the sheer influence of military as opposed to civilian values and powers was a noted characteristic of Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany. The Kaiser was commander-in-chief de facto and not only, as in Britain, de jure. A primitive form of "military-industrial complex" had stoked up and exploited arms races to satisfy the needs of the vast armaments industry and to divert public attention from domestic political questions. Leading figures around the Kaiser were seeking an excuse to go to war from the controversial "Kriegsrat" of December 1912 onwards. A vigorous fulfilment of Germany's military alliance obligations to Austria-Hungary was regarded as axiomatic. Most important of all for our purposes, the Germans had only one war-plan, that created by Count von Schlieffen in 1905 and later modified by his successor as Chief of General Staff, the younger Moltke: it was a plan which was so inflexible that it meant going to war as soon as Russia even mobilised; which threatened the overthrow of France as its first major aim, although that power might not be directly involved in the conflict; and which involved a clear transgression of the territorial rights of those neutral neighbours, Belgium and Luxembourg. With such aggressive forces at hand in Berlin, and with such an irresponsible operational plan to hand, it was scarcely surprising that what had begun as a quarrel in the Balkans should have escalated into a conflict involving almost all of the Great Powers4. Critics of the Fischer school have not only sought to dispute the validity of the interpretation which it has placed upon German policy itself but - and this is the obvious riposte to the claim that one power or person was responsible for an historical act - they have also argued that the outbreak of the war cannot be fully understood by looking merely at one of the players in the game. The policies, aims and decisions of the other participants deserve equal scrutiny, if a fair overall picture is to be drawn. When this is done, they claim, it will be seen that Germany was not alone in 1914 in containing elements who looked forward to war or in possessing inflexible and ambitious war plans. The French General Staff, thirsting to regain Alsace-Lorraine, was only with difficulty restrained from invading Belgium itself as a flank move against Germany if war broke out. The Russians possibly possessed the most inflexible plan of all, and their inability to mobilise separately against Austria-Hungary proved to be one of the most fateful errors of the July crisis. In Vienna, too, there existed both the ambition to engage in a war and the military plans to implement that ambition. Even Great Britain had, as a conse- quence of her staff discussions with France 1905 and 1914, become drawn into a system of military checks and obligations which no one power alone could control. Should any of these states decide upon war in order to achieve its aims, it was unlikely that the others could keep out. Militarism, and military planning, had set up the European states like a row of dominoes; and it only needed one to fall to bring all the rest to the grounds. Quite apart from this present controversy, with all its political and ideological overtones, there also exists an interest in the operational planning of the Great Powers in the few decades before 1914 from what might be termed the "military-institutional" point of view; for this was the first time in a period of peace that the major nation- states developed war plans in any systematic way. Compared with the elaborate staff organisations which evolved during and after the Second World War6, their predeces- sors no doubt appear primitive but the fact remains that they had grown up remark- ably swiftly. That this creation and expansion of military and naval staffs took place in the latter half of the 19th century can be attributed to a number of general causes, the most important being: a) The overall growth in the size of bureaucracies and governmental structures, this itself being a reflection of the increasing complexity of Western society as it underwent the processes of industrialisation and modernisation, and also a reflec- tion of the desire of politicians and public to see more efficient organisations of state replacing ramshackle bodies often established centuries earlier7. b) The increasing pace of technological invention and change in both armies and navies throughout the nineteenth century, which was a further consequence of the "Unbound Prometheus"8 - the unstoppable and often unforeseen interaction of technological breakthroughs which occurred once the Industrial Revolution had got under way. New weapons, new forms of propulsion, new methods of com- municating information, all had military repercussions; and armies and navies had either to keep in touch with such developments or to suffer the consequences of their conservatism when they encountered opponents using more advanced tech- niques and weapons of war. In addition, the growth of a "military-industrial com- plex" (especially with regard to shipbuilding) provided both a built-in mechanism for the creation of newer and more powerful weapons, and the economic and political forces to urge their development9. c) The increasing complexity of warfare in a more general sense as those further consequences of the Industrial Revolution - mass production, vastly improved transport systems, and the more efficient organisation and deployment of vast armies - made their impact. In an age where armies were beginning to total millions (including reservists and conscripts without much knowledge of military life), where railways were transforming all previous concepts of mobility, and where logistical prepara- tions for a campaign could no longer rely upon the age-old system of living off the area in which the troops were billeted, organisation and planning became more exalted than ever before in the armed services. It was obviously crucial to control these huge war machines and to give them a direction. d) As a final consequence of all these developments, armies and navies were forced nolens volens to become more professional, that is, to contain and recruit officers who knew foreign languages, who possessed the organisational ability to create and control a railway or ammunition supply system, who were well acquainted with technological innovations and who could study and assimilate the latest technical and strategical writings. Improved educational qualifications upon entry and increased training of staff officers became the hallmark of late-nineteenth-century armed services10; and, in all this, the dominant role now being played by the "expert" was but a mirror of trends which were also in evidence in the foreign and colonial ministries, educational departments, commercial and financial offices and virtually all other sectors of government and administration11. But the most important short-term impetus to the formation of General Staffs and the development of operational planning in the later nineteenth century was the undoubted success of the Prussian military system in the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870/71, for these conflicts provided what seemed to be near-perfect examples of the way in which war should be conducted. Universal military service, and the planned deployment of a vast number of reservists in the front line, became the norm in almost all European armies. Moltke's clever use of the German railway network to transport and supply his large armies produced great admiration - and emulation - in foreign states. And, in a similar fashion, the Prussian General Staff, the "brains" behind this new military system, became the model for other powers to copy; some countries, such as Japan, Turkey and certain Latin American states, going so far as to invite the Germans to help reorganise their entire military establishments.
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